Do you build NPCs to live or to die?

[Storminator]

It's usually hard to get high enough to punch someone mounted on the back of a dinosaur.

pffft.

It's not my job to figure out how to punch the guy on the back of a dinosaur.

PS

 

[NewJeffCT]

A friend and I got into a conversation about the point of a monster/npc and how we build it. He build npcs like he would a pc...as tough as possible. Notably max out the AC so they are impossible to hit, use Dex over Con, for instance. Better to not be hit than to have extra hit points.

I don't agree on this. To me the purpose of an npc is to die (while being fun for the players). That doesn't mean it is easy to kill, a challenge can be a lot of fun, but frustration isn't.

Frustration mounts when players have their turn wasted. High AC, DR, and SR are the top problems I've seen. Now these have to be in place, especially for key battles against milestone type npcs, but against lowly minions I go a different route. Max out hit points so they can take the punishment.

The battles that we all joke about being boring and frustrating are always those that feature high AC creatures. When everyone is missing turn after turn, players get bored.

Which do you do? Why?

Depends on the situation. If I'm building a high level bad guy that is supposed to be a major encounter, I try to build them how I would build a character as they went up in level - so, I do put ranks into things like Language skills and a few Knowledge skills - provided they have the spare skill points. Do I do that with a 10th level barbarian? No, because they don't have the spare skill points and don't get a lot of bonus feats.

That said, players often try to do a bit of min-maxing and pick feats at X level because it is the first one in the Dodge-Mobility-Spring Attack chain, or pick that feat because it's a requirement for a prestige class they hope to take in 3-4 levels. So, if Bill the Blackguard got called by his evil deity into service when he was only a level 4 fighter, I will tend to pick feats with the bad guy planning on taking Blackguard down the road.

For low level minions, I tend to just pick what will make them most effective in the one combat they are there for - I don't have the spare time to decide which feats & skills the level 4 fighter captain of the guard would have.

 

[Hereticus]

Some bad guy NPCs sole purpose in life is fight to the death and die a quick and violent death.

Others are meant to be a perpetual thorn in the side of the characters.

It is he latter that is built to last and develops a personality.

 

[pawsplay]

I build them logically, not optimized for a hypothetical battle. That means, for NPCs that are supposed to be a credible challenge, that the PCs can expect a hard fight. For boss fights, specifically, I have three goals:

1) Last a long time
2) Still lose
3) While having a credible chance of killing a PC during the fight

Ideally, I'd like every other boss fight to result in a PC death, but not a TPK.

 

[Blizzardb]

A friend and I got into a conversation about the point of a monster/npc and how we build it. He build npcs like he would a pc...as tough as possible. Notably max out the AC so they are impossible to hit, use Dex over Con, for instance. Better to not be hit than to have extra hit points.

<snip>

On a side note, I never build my PCs as tough as possible. For me, it is great fun to play an unoptimized character, so i often take suboptimal feats, attributes, etc. I especially like to play a character with at least 1 attribute below 8 (we usually roll dice at character creation, so this happens from time to time).

I build my NPCs pretty much the same way - like a real person with its own perks and flaws, not like the stereotypical super-optimized class archetype with 20 on the primary attribute and so on.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Which do you do? Why?

Am I building an NPC, or an encounter? Or an NPC who can turn into an encounter if the PC's povoke it? Or an encounter that can turn into an NPC if the PC's diplomacy it into submission?

In combat, I agree with you, high defenses are obnoxious. It is no fun to miss, it is no fun to do no damage. They sometimes make sense, but I would just as soon convert those defenses into MORE HP, or healing abilities, and have them always hit and always dealt lots of damage (and have "phases" where their strategy changes so it's not just hacking at a wall).

But your friend isn't wrong -- just perhaps a bit paranoid. I don't design my characters with a focus on defense, either. I focus them on theme, or personality, or archetype. One of those is "defense," but it's certainly not all of them.

Life on either side of the DM screen is pretty cheap and disposable. That contributes to the kind of cinematic wahoo that I like in a game. Your friend appears to like to play things grittier, grimmer, more desperate. His NPC's reflect his PC's like that because that's his style: more about "living to see tomorrow" than about "badass ninjas with magic missiles."

He's not wrong, but he might want to find a better system than D&D to play his high-DEF tanks in, since D&D doesn't have a satisfying way to fight these untouchables. Give him a more gritty system, where one-hit-kills are common and where you're always a few pips on the d20 away from obliteration, but maybe that uses "stables" of characters rather than one PC, or that has good resurrection/respawning rules that are common....D&D (in 4e, and also in other editions) doesn't quite deliver that level of grittiness.

 

[Kask]

Do you build NPCs to live or to die?

Which do you do? Why?

Well, I make them to fit into their logical place in the campaign world. They are built to fulfill that purpose/position. There is no predetermined "live or die" thought that carries over to how I design them.

 

[Vegepygmy]

I build my NPCs to live. That doesn't mean "to be as hard is possible to kill", but "Build them not like a 5 round combat encounter, but as something which lives in the game world and has a place in it".

This.

 

[Stalker0]

In my 4e game I build npcs using the straight up rules, which gives me a good blend of offense and defense.

 

[Umbran]

Which do you do? Why?

Neither. I build them to be what they are supposed to be, as a character. I assume the NPC has a history, and they are built to be consistent with that history and their goals. The PCs are only one bit of their life so far (possibly the last bit), but they don't know that beforehand.

That history may be pretty simple ("generic kobold" for example).